by Penny Jordan
‘Oh, Sean, I just can’t wait for us to have children.’
Now it was Kate’s voice haunting him, and he swore savagely beneath his breath.
‘I’d hate to have the kind of marriage that didn’t include a family, like my aunt and uncle’s.’
He could still see the way she had shuddered, as though in revulsion.
‘Don’t worry, I’ll give you as many as you want,’ he had boasted, already aroused at the thought of how he would give her the children they both wanted so much.
And each and every time he had made love with her that feeling had been there, that surge of atavistic male pride in the knowledge that he had the power to create a new life within her.
Only he had not had that power. Not according to what his doctor had told him.
It hadn’t been just his present and his future the doctor’s words had destroyed; it had been his own belief and pride in himself as well. Suddenly he was not the man he had always thought himself to be. Suddenly he was not, in his own opinion, very much of a man at all.
Holding Oliver had brought back with savage intensity all that he could never have, and yet he couldn’t hate the little boy—far from it, in fact. Instead of wanting to reject the child another man had given the woman he loved, he had actually felt drawn towards him.
If only Kate knew just how much he wished that Oliver was his child! And Kate herself still his wife?
After she had betrayed him by sleeping with another man? A bitter smile twisted Sean’s lips.
Kate might have thought that hurling his infidelity at him was a powerful weapon, but instead it was just his own lie to her. His supposed affair had been a lie, made up to expedite the speedy ending of their marriage so that he could set Kate free.
And since the reason he’d been so grimly determined to set her free had been so that she could find another man to father the children he knew were so important to her, it was illogical for him to feel the way he did about the fact that she had done so.
Whoever the man was, he was a fool as well as a scoundrel for abandoning Kate and his son—and for throwing away Kate’s love.
The savagery and immediacy of his own pain felt like a hammer-blow against his heart.
* * *
‘Everyone’s surprised that our new boss is spending so much time here,’ Laura confided chattily to Kate on Thursday, as she came into her office shortly after lunch. ‘I mean, he has two other companies. Do you suppose it means that we can all stop worrying about being made redundant?’ she asked hopefully. ‘I mean, if he wasn’t planning on keeping this place going he wouldn’t be spending so much time here, would he? Kate?’ she prompted when Kate didn’t make any response. ‘Other things on your mind?’ Laura guessed.
‘Sorry—I didn’t get much sleep last night,’ Kate answered. It was the truth after all.
‘You do look a bit peaky,’ Laura acknowledged as she studied her.
Peaky! Kate grimaced to herself. She felt as though her emotions had been ripped apart and devoured by a pack of scavengers, and that now all that was left of them was the dead bones.
It was the dry grittiness of her eyes that made her want to blink, not something stupid like crying, she assured herself fiercely. After all, she had done enough of that during the night, hadn’t she? With her face buried in her pillow so that she wouldn’t wake Oliver.
She was still in shock, Kate admitted to herself, and the cause of that shock was her discovery of just how vulnerable she still was to Sean!
‘Oh, no! Look at the time! I’d better go.’ Kate hurried past Laura as she made her exit.
Behind her shock and pain lay a huge, deep dam of pent-up anger. How dared Sean refuse to believe that Oliver was his child? How dared he be such a hypocrite as to accuse her of sleeping with someone else?
Thinking of her son made her turn anxiously to her silent mobile. Oliver had complained that his tummy hurt again at breakfast time, but to her relief when she had taken his temperature it had been normal and so she had taken him to school.
* * *
Sean drummed his fingers irritably on his desk. Pushing back his chair, he stood up, raking his hair with one hand, and paced the floor as he mentally practised what he intended to say to Kate.
Halfway through the carefully chosen words he stopped abruptly and asked himself angrily what the hell was wrong with him. All he had to say to Kate was that he wanted her to have the money she had refused to accept when they had divorced. Hell, if need be he could tell her that his accountants were insisting it was handed over otherwise he would invoke some kind of tax penalty. His decision had nothing whatsoever to do with Oliver, other than the fact that he hated seeing Kate have to struggle—especially when she had a small child to support.
A small child who wasn’t his.
Opening his office door, he instructed his secretary to tell Kate he wanted to see her.
* * *
‘Jenny rang down to say that you wanted to see me?’
‘Yes, I do,’ Sean confirmed, turning away to look out of his office window. ‘You must have found it hard to make time to study for your Master’s?’
‘Yes, in some ways I did,’ Kate agreed warily, wondering why he had sent for her and what this was leading up to.
‘I imagine that it would have been difficult with Oliver,’ Sean pressed her.
‘Yes, it was,’ Kate confirmed.
‘Why didn’t you ask his father for financial support?’
When she didn’t answer, Sean swung round. The light streaming in through the large window highlighted the tension in his face, and for a moment Kate almost weakened. He had been everything to her after all. As she was now everything to Oliver, she reminded herself immediately, before taking a deep breath and asking sharply, ‘What are you trying to do? Trap me? You’re wasting your time, Sean. You are Oliver’s father. Nothing and no one—not even you—can alter that fact.’
Her stomach churned as she saw Sean’s expression hardening with rejection.
‘You are the one who is wasting your time, Kate. Oliver is not my son. He can’t be—’ Sean tensed and stopped speaking, taking a deep breath before he continued tersely, ‘He can’t be foisted off on me!’
His heart was hammering against his ribs. It was a sign of the effect Kate was having on him that he had come so close to blurting out the truth! Fortunately he had just managed to stop himself in time!
Kate clenched her hands as she caught the underlying and suppressed violence in Sean’s voice, her dismay giving way to shock as she heard him adding grimly, ‘What I wanted to talk to you about was—’ He stopped speaking as the abrupt shrill of Kate’s mobile cut across his words. Red-faced, she fished it out of her bag, her embarrassment forgotten as she saw that the call was from Oliver’s nursery.
‘He’s been sick and he’s asking for me?’ Kate couldn’t keep the anxiety out of her voice as she repeated what the other woman was telling her. ‘He wasn’t very well this morning,’ she admitted. ‘But he didn’t have a temperature then...’
Even though Kate tried to turn away from Sean she knew that he could hear the conversation she was having with the nursery school teacher.
‘I...I’ll try to—’ she began, only to find that Sean was spinning her round to face him.
His expression was grim as he took the mobile from her and said tersely into it, ‘She’s on her way.’
‘You have no right—’ Kate said angrily, but Sean had ended the call and his hand was on her arm, urging her towards the door.
‘We’ll go in my car,’ he told her. ‘For one thing we’ll get there faster, and for another you’ll be worrying too much to drive safely.’
Kate opened her mouth to protest, but they were already in the car park and heading for Sean’s car. He held the passenger door open f
or her and reluctantly she got in.
‘Did the nursery say exactly what’s wrong with him? Have they called a doctor?’ Sean asked as he slid into the driver’s seat and started the engine.
Kate wanted to refuse to tell him anything—after all, he had just rejected Oliver—but her maternal anxiety overruled her pride, and apprehensively she began to repeat what she had been told. ‘He’s been sick, apparently. There’s a bug going round. He said this morning that his tummy was hurting him.’
‘You sent him to nursery, knowing that he wasn’t well?’
Kate could hear the criticism and disbelief in Sean’s voice.
‘Why didn’t you stay at home with him?’
Angrily Kate defended herself. ‘I have to work, remember? Anyway, I can’t just take time off like that.’
‘Of course you can,’ Sean contradicted her flatly. ‘You’re a mother. People would understand.’
‘No one at work knows about Oliver,’ Kate admitted abruptly, deliberately turning her head to face the window so that he couldn’t see her expression.
‘Ashamed of him?’
‘No!’ Kate denied furiously, and immediately turned to look at him. She realised too late that Sean had deliberately provoked her, knowing what her reaction would be.
‘Then why?’
‘For goodness’ sake, Sean, surely I don’t have to tell you the business facts of life?’ Kate answered wryly. ‘Not all firms will take on women who are mothers, especially if they are single mothers. I needed this job. I didn’t mention Oliver at my first interview, and then after I had been offered the job I discovered that John had an unwritten rule about not employing mothers of young children.’
‘A rule it would be unlawful for him to try to enforce,’ Sean pointed out. ‘And Oliver needs you! Hell, Kate, both you and I know what it’s like to grow up without a mother.’
‘Oliver has a mother.’
‘But not a mother who can be there for him when he needs her.’
Kate couldn’t maintain her barriers against the pain that swamped her. It invaded every nerve-ending and tore at her heart.
‘Since you refuse to accept that Oliver is your child, you hardly have the right to tell me how to bring him up, do you?’ she challenged him bitterly, only realising as she managed to blink away her angry tears that they had reached the village.
The moment Sean pulled up outside the nursery Kate was reaching for the car’s door handle, throwing a stiff, ‘Thank you for the lift,’ to him over her shoulder.
But to her consternation Sean was already out of the car and opening her door, announcing curtly, ‘I’m coming in with you.’
‘I don’t want you to,’ Kate protested.
‘Oliver might need to see a doctor,’ Sean told her flatly. ‘I can run you there.’
A doctor? Anxiously Kate hurried towards the nursery, her concern for her son far more important right now than arguing with Sean.
The moment Kate pushed open the door Oliver’s nursery teacher came hurrying towards her.
‘Where’s Oliver? How is he?’ Kate demanded frantically as she scanned the room anxiously, unable to see her son amongst the throng of children in the room.
‘He’s fine, but he’s asleep.’
‘Asleep? But—’ Kate began, only to be interrupted.
‘Has he seen a doctor?’ Sean demanded sharply.
It irritated Kate a little to see the immediacy with which the older woman responded to Sean’s calm authority.
‘I’m a trained nurse,’ she informed him, almost defensively. ‘I don’t think there’s anything seriously wrong. Oliver felt poorly before lunch, and then he was sick afterwards, but he seems fine now—if rather tired.’
Turning to look at Kate, she added, slightly reprovingly, ‘He seems upset about something, and I do rather think that might be the cause of the problem. Young children often react with physical symptoms to emotional stress.’
Kate flushed sensitively, sure that she could hear a note of criticism in the other woman’s voice.
‘I’ll go through and get Ollie and take him home,’ Kate told her quietly, unaware of the way Sean was watching her reaction to the older woman’s remarks.
Oliver was asleep in one of the beds in a room off the playroom, and Kate felt the familiar pull on her emotions as she leaned over him. In so many ways he was Sean’s son, even if Sean himself refused to accept Ollie as his child. Tiredly she bent to pick him up.
‘I’ll take him.’
Kate turned round. She hadn’t realised that Sean had followed her into the small shadowy room.
‘There’s no need,’ she told him in a small clipped voice, focusing her gaze not on Sean’s face but on one dark-suited shoulder. A big mistake, she recognised achingly, when she had to suppress a longing to lean her head against its comforting strength and feel Sean’s arms come round her, hear Sean’s voice telling her that he believed her and that he loved her, that right now this very minute he was going to take both her and Oliver home with him.
As she stood there, staring fixatedly at his shoulder, Kate was suddenly overwhelmed by the searing knowledge of how alone and afraid she sometimes felt. Her throat ached and so did her head, shocked nausea was churning her stomach, and just the sight of Sean lifting his sleeping son into his arms was enough to make her feel as though her heart was breaking.
Get a grip, Kate advised herself sharply. This kind of emotion was a luxury she simply could not afford.
Once they were outside the nursery Kate stood in front of Sean and demanded, ‘Give him to me now. I can carry him home from here.’
‘You carry him? You look as though you can barely carry yourself,’ Sean told her bluntly.
‘I’ll carry him!’
They had just reached the cottage when Oliver woke up, stirring sleepily in Sean’s arms.
Opening the door, Kate stood just inside it and held out her arms for her son. But to her chagrin Oliver turned away from her, burrowing his head against Sean’s chest and going back to sleep.
A huge splinter of ice was piercing her heart. This was the first time Oliver had rejected her in favour of someone else—and not just anyone else, but Sean, his father.
‘You’d better give him to me,’ she told Sean sharply. ‘I’m sure the last thing you’ll want is him being sick on your suit.’
As he handed Oliver to her and she put him down gently on the shabby sofa that took up one wall of the kitchen she heard him say quietly, ‘No, actually the last thing I want is knowing that you went to another man’s bed so quickly after leaving mine!’
Immediately Kate stiffened. ‘You have no right to say that.’
‘Do you think I don’t know that?’ Sean retaliated savagely. ‘Don’t you think I know that I have thrown away all my rights where you are concerned!’
‘All your rights?’ Horrified, Kate wondered what reckless surge of self-destruction had prompted such dangerous words, and spoken in such a soft, sexually challenging voice. And, as though that was not folly enough, she discovered that she had a sudden compulsion to let her gaze slide helplessly to Sean’s mouth and then linger wantonly there, whilst her body reminded her hungrily of the pleasure he had once given it, how long it had been since...
‘Kate, for God’s sake, will you please stop looking at me like that?’ Sean warned her harshly.
Mortified, she defended herself immediately, fibbing, ‘I don’t know what you mean!’
Instantly Sean took a step towards her, a look smouldering in the depths of his eyes that made a fierce thrill of dangerous excitement race through her.
‘Liar! You know perfectly well what I mean.’ Sean checked her thickly. ‘You were looking at my mouth as though you couldn’t wait to feel it against your own.’
What the hell was
he doing? Sean challenged himself inwardly. His sole reason for having anything at all to do with Kate was to give her some much needed financial help, and that was all. Nothing else. Absolutely nothing else.
And yet within seconds of telling himself that, Sean could hear himself asking softly, ‘Is that what you want, Kate? Because if it is...’
Just the sound of his voice was having a disturbingly erotic effect on her body—and on her senses. Defensively she closed her eyes, and then realised she had made a bad move as immediately she was swamped with mental images from the past.
Sean leaning over her in their bed, the morning sun on his bronzed skin, his eyes gleaming with sensual intent and knowledge between his narrowed eyelids. How quickly that cool look had grown hot and urgent when she had reached out to touch him, tugging teasingly on the fine hair covering his chest, before giving in to the erotic pleasure of sliding her fingers down the silky pathway which led over the hard flat plane of his belly to where the soft hair thickened.
Before she even realised what she was doing, never mind being able to stop herself, Kate felt her fingers stretching and curling, as though they could actually feel the strong, hard pulse of Sean’s erection within their grip.
As soon as she realised what she was doing—and what she was feeling—Kate thrust her hands behind her back, guilty heat scorching her skin.
Angry both with herself for feeling the way she had and with Sean for being responsible for that feeling, she told him fiercely, ‘No, it isn’t.’ She lied. ‘Why should I want someone who did what you did? Someone who broke his marriage vows and took someone else to his bed? How could I want you, Sean?’
‘Snap—that’s exactly how I feel about you!’ Sean stopped her passionately. ‘You do realise, don’t you, that I can throw the same accusations at you? How do you think it feels to discover that you didn’t even wait a full month before jumping into bed with someone else? Why did you do that, Kate? Was it loneliness, or just spite?’
‘I didn’t do any such thing,’ Kate denied shakily. His words had touched a wound in her heart that she had thought completely healed. But, as she had recently discovered, the scar tissue over it had been vulnerably fragile, and now the pain was agonisingly raw again.